The Importance of History And The Lessons For Today

Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Try
to imagine history without Western civilization: it’s hard to do. For the last
five hundred years no civilization has had a deeper impact on world history
than the West; its footprint lies everywhere[1]. There
are many historians who claim that the rise of the West is the most important
historical phenomenon in our last two thousand years, and I am among them[2]. Some
scholars challenge this (many on purely moral grounds, but without much
evidence). They suggest that the West has had no more impact on world history
than any of the Rest, and that, if the West shaped other civilizations, then it
was equally shaped by the Rest. The West does owe some debts to China, Islam,
Byzantium, as well as the Hellenic world, but no one could claim that the West
resembles any of these other societies in anything greater than a superficial
sense. And then there is the West’s impact on the rest of the world; an impact
greater than that of any other society or civilization.

Historian
John Roberts wrote in 1985: “That is the West’s ambiguous triumph-the
difference it has made to the world”[3].
Western civilization is not without its faults. Imperialism is now condemned as
a great violation of human rights by those who only understand human rights and
value through Western ideals. The Great War, the Nazi Holocaust, the endless
pursuit of material gains, and all the misdeeds of imperialism are certainly
products of Western civilization. But does this really make the triumph of the
West ambiguous? To answer that question let us consider the difference the West
has made to the world.

It
seems that so many people long for the past. The past was simpler; life more
enjoyable. Modern readers must be reminded of the lot of the vast majority of
mankind. Before the modern world that Western Europe created, poverty, disease,
violence, and hunger characterized all pre-modern societies[4]. Considering
only income, the masses lived on little more than a dollar a day[5].
For all intents and purposes the people of the world were no better off than
their ancestors at the dawn of civilization. Poverty, and the desperation that
comes with it, was the norm amongst our ancestors. Even in the best of times no
consistent, long-term increase in living standards was possible. Technological
change just wasn’t fast enough to allow economic growth to continuously outpace
population growth. Jean Bourdichon portrayed the misery of pre-modern societies
in his piece “The Four Conditions of Society: Poverty”. There was no middle
class; a person was rich or poor depending on the family he or she was born
into, and most everyone stayed there.

Life
expectancy was also abysmal; just 24 at birth for anyone born between the dawn
of civilization and the sixteenth century[6]. If
a person survived to his or her fifteenth birthday the chances of reaching a
ripe old age were drastically improved. Survival is the operative word; almost
a third of children between 0 and 15 living in England in 1650 would check out
between those birthdays[7].
Almost a quarter of female deaths at birth were the result of infanticide.
Disease, often helped along by terrible sanitation, famine, and dirty clothes,
checked population growth. Many westerners are familiar with the bubonic plague
which struck not only Europe, but all of Eurasia in the fourteenth century.
That was only the most famous of mediaeval diseases. Today, many of the poor in
industrial nations live healthier lives than the wealthiest of pre-industrial
societies.

A
man’s home is his castle, and in pre-modern times it needed to be fortified as
such. People were not safe in or out of their homes. Highway robbers frequently
struck unsuspecting passersby. The Biblical parable of the Good Samaritan
depicted a common incident in which a man is robbed and beaten while traveling
between two cities. More alert and sensible travelers moved in groups, and
carried concealed weapons. Even the American National Rifle Association is not
as paranoid as people were in pre-modern societies. Before conceptions of human
rights were fully developed a ruler’s peasants were his life blood- and fair
game for invading armies. In the past, warfare meant plunder, rape, pillage,
and the enslavement of defeated populations. Peter Bruegel’s “The Triumph of Death”
painted in the late sixteenth century portrayed a gruesome massacre during one
of Europe’s many religious wars. Hunter-gatherer societies are sometimes
idealized for their equality and peacefulness. Yet, a person is more likely to
be murdered in primitive tribes than in today’s modern societies.

The
modern world is an escape from all of this. For a start consider that it is now
possible to write optimistically about “the end of poverty”[8]. Once,
it was thought that nothing could be done to ease poverty. People were poor
because they did not have what it took to be rich, or God had made them poor in
order to serve the rich, so the thinking went. The West was the first society
to toss such thinking out the window. The West’s wealth brought new confidence
and organization to fight poverty not just at home but abroad as well. The
United Nations and other international organizations set goals and timetables
for achieving increasing standards of living among the poorest countries. A
multitude of economists, sociologists, and big-hearted individuals have
dedicated themselves to eradicating poverty around the world. Paul Collier and
Jeffrey Sachs have made careers locating poverty and offering solutions because
they know that poverty can be beaten[9].

Indeed,
their appeals are to the West, and other now developed countries to help the
poor around the world. They know that Western investment in, and policies
toward, poor countries can make a great difference. According to Sachs: “The
wealth of the rich world, the power of today’s vast storehouses of knowledge,
and the declining fraction of the world that needs help to escape from poverty
all make the end of poverty a realistic prediction by the year 2025”[10].
The Western world broke the poverty trap in which all societies throughout
history existed. Russia was the first nation to attempt to emulate the Western
European states. Since then, an unbelievable number of nations have lifted
their citizens from misery and poverty to, or at least towards, wealth.

The
upsurge in incomes for all but a few societies has brought with it greater life
expectancy. Many countries sent bright young students to Western universities
to study, among other things, medicine. They brought that knowledge back their
home country, and taught their fellow citizens Western medical practices. Many
societies decry the injustices of imperialism for good reason, but colonization
was not without benefits. The Western world brought with its settlers and
missionaries vaccines to combat tropical diseases just as lethal to Africans as
to themselves.

Violence,
too, has declined. In part this is the result of greater wealth and less
misery. As people become less desperate to meet even basic needs, they are less
likely to rob or murder for their food or shelter. Yet, violence is often the
result of a need to seek revenge for insults or injustices. Steven Pinker
superbly documented the history of violence, especially its decline among
civilized societies, in his book The
Better Angels of Our Nature. Not only did Western European governments
develop a monopoly of power, but they also instilled trust to settle disputes
among the vast majority of their citizenry. Violence increases when citizens
feel that they have to take justice into their own hands. Thus “an imposition
of the rule of law may end the bloody mayhem of feuding warlords, but reducing
rates of violence further, to the levels enjoyed by modern European societies,
involves a more nebulous process in which certain populations accede to the rule
of law that has been imposed on them”[11].
Western Europe became steadily less violent, and it was only in the colonies
far from a government capable of punishing wrongdoers that violence was more
common. The decline in violence spread outward from Western Europe.

What
about values? For a start consider the British Empire. Harvard historian Niall
Ferguson argues that the British Empire had a self-liquidating character, with
notions of liberty being the most important ideal. “Once a society had
sufficiently adopted the other institutions the British brought with them, it
became very hard for the British to prohibit that political liberty to which
they attached so much significance for themselves”[12].
The American Revolution was not simply a revolt against taxation. British
citizens tossed off British rule because they believed the government was no
longer securing certain rights, among them: liberty. The wave of decolonization
in the post-World War II era was a push by colonies to achieve the same degree
of freedom and dignity enjoyed by their respective Mother Countries. The
British were not the only self-liquidating empire. The Haitians took hold of
the values of the French Revolution and sought their own liberty and equality.

As
for institutions there is no doubt that the most successful are those pioneered
by the West[13].
Japan stands as a great example of what can be achieved with Western
institutions. Liberal democracy, the mixed economy, and secure property rights
are trumpet by many as the not-so-secret ingredients of Western economic and
technological success. The consumer economy by which industrial production
expands, not to meet the demands of the government, but of consumers is a
defining feature of the Industrial Revolution. Education, too, is increasingly
being westernized around the world. China is now finding that moving further
and further from communist institutions is preferable in order to maintain its
stunning economic growth.

Globalization

The
West has, in short, brought us the modern world, with all its benefits and,
indeed, troubles. It was a not a perfect path; some may argue that there were
alternatives which would have resulted in less suffering. Geoffrey Parker
claimed that the West’s principal export during its early imperial phase was
violence[14].
Yet violence was commonplace[15],
and it would be difficult to argue that a more peaceful and less invasive way
to spread modernity was possible.

Some
may argue that modernity has actually made us more vulnerable, and that we die
in more horrific ways than ever before. Car crashes claim the lives of far too
many young drivers and their passengers. Smoking and processed foods with low
nutrition kill us slowly and rot us internally. Guns and other weapons make
killing easier and less personal. These things are all deplorable, and it is
likely that these problems will not go away.

Yet, studying Western
history allows me to be an optimist on the future. In the past, we thought that
societal problems were the norm; that there was nothing that could be done
about them. Today, in the Western world and increasingly more and more of human
societies, it is possible to believe that the next generation will be better
off than the one before it. We deplore poverty, hunger, disease, violence, and
oppression because of our modern frame of reference. We know what is possible
for humanity to achieve because the West has brought the world to this point.
Is that an ambiguous triumph? I do not believe that it is. The world is a
better place in almost every measurable sense today than it was five hundred
years ago. The challenge is explaining why it was in Western Europe that this
first happened.

The Rise of the West

For
Europeans, the fifteenth century was a troubling time, and it was by no means
obvious to anyone that the little European states were on the verge of world
domination. Indeed, the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the subsequent
conquest of the Balkan Peninsula by the Ottoman Turks meant that the infidel
appeared unstoppable. European statesmen looked nervously to the southeast and
wondered if Vienna or Rome might go the same way as Constantinople. Granted,
Europeans were on the move during this century. The conquest of Ceuta in 1415,
the explorations of the Portuguese, the Reconquest of Spain, and the discovery
of America for Europeans evinced a boundless energy and mastery of sailing.
Even these achievements seemed pathetic when placed along the achievements of
the Chinese and Islamic world-the other two major power centers of the
fifteenth century[16].

Of these three power
centers, China was the most impressive in the fifteenth century. Far from being
a cultural backwater the Chinese Confucian bureaucracy was chosen by merit not
status through a series of rigorous tests. Chinese technology was well ahead of
Europe, and had been throughout the Middle Ages. A few of the more famous
inventions are gunpowder, the spinning wheel, blast furnaces, paper money, and
printing by movable type[17].
Each of these predated their more familiar European imitations. Chinese
textiles were of such superior quality that they could regard European textiles
as inferior well into the eighteenth century. The ironworks of Honan and Hopei
were churning out 125,000 tons of iron every year; more iron in the eleventh
century than all of Britain in the eighteenth century[18].
The early fifteenth century was also a busy period under the new Ming dynasty.
Construction of the Forbidden Palace was underway and employed a million
workers. The Grand Canal, with its system of locks and arch bridges, was
reopened in 1411-a feat of engineering in its own right.

But the most impressive activity was going on
in the Indian Ocean. The Chinese emperor, Yong-lo sent out a series of oceanic
voyages to collect tribute from, and bestow gifts upon, other societies. In
ships that dwarfed the Portuguese vessels that would later call at their
harbors, the Chinese made seven voyages under the command of Admiral Cheng Ho
between 1405 and 1433 and sailed as far south as Mombasa on the east coast of
Africa. It was entirely possible that the Chinese could have sailed around the
Cape of Good Hope and into the harbor at Lisbon to demand that the Portuguese
king acknowledge the power of the Son of Heaven. Then, quite suddenly, the
voyages were stopped, an imperial decree banned the construction of oceangoing
vessels, and China closed itself off; a missed opportunity.

Historians have often
been puzzled as to why the Chinese, with such advanced sailing techniques, did
not continue their voyages. Mark Elvin provides some insights: Foreign
expeditions were conducted under the Emperor’s auspices reached their height at
the time of Cheng Ho, but restrictions on private trade existed long before
these voyages. The Ming navy became a luxury because the reconstruction of the
Grand Canal in 1411 meant that a merchant navy, once necessary to transport
grain to Peking, no longer needed protection. First the navy, and then merchant
shipping by sea was banned. Much of this was done to prevent piracy, but it reflected
deeper cultural suspicions. China was made self-sufficient (in Ming theory) by
the final opening of the Canal. Self-sufficiency, in turn, meant the Chinese no
longer had to trade with mistrusted foreigners, and could turn inward with
hardly a second look[19].

Now we can shed some
light on a deeper question: why didn’t China rule the world since they appear
to have possessed many of the ingredients of power. It seems that China
suffered from two conditions: being autocratic and culturally conservative[20]. The
Ming had taken power from the Mongols and longed for a return to traditional
structures of society. Since the emperor ruled with power and authority that
even the Hapsburgs or Louis XIV could only dream of, his will was law. The
Grand Canal, army, Forbidden Palace, Great Wall, and other great Chinese
achievements existed for state purposes and could be restored or neglected at
the whim of the ruler. At the same time as Cheng Ho’s voyages, the emperor
banned foreign contacts by civilians, revealing a fear and mistrust of
foreigners. A growing isolationism in the Ming court closed off China to rest
of the world except for certain trading posts on the coast. The first Ming
Emperor never forgot that he had been a peasant once, and ascended the throne
only after deposing the last Mongol emperor.

There was also little
support for mercantile activity and technological change. Restriction on
mercantile activity began in 1309 under Mongol rule. No overseas voyages could
be made under any circumstances. Some restrictions were opened up, and certain
goods could be traded, but by the time of the Ming new restrictions meant that
only tributary goods could be exchanged in recognition of Ming power. To the
Ming, trade with barbarians was a favor to them. China did not need to trade,
but barbarians did. If China closed off trade with the outside world it did not
hurt China, but it was crushing to the barbarians. At least that was the
prevailing Ming philosophy.

China was not stagnant
during the Ming period, but whatever changes did take place they were not
widespread or revolutionary. Merchants were marginal members of society who
often gave up merchant activity to buy land and seek political power. The
landowning class had considerable weight in Chinese society owing to the growth
of population, and they had the greatest influence at court. The Confucian
bureaucracy may have been meritocratic in the sense that anyone could make it,
but the landed elite had far more leisure time to learn the Confucian classics
on which the tests were based. Therefore, the merchant interests were weakened
while a conservative Confucian bureaucracy held immense sway at court.

Chinese technological
improvements from the Sung period were used to ensure the status quo remained
unchanged. Printing did not spread new ideas as it did in Europe; it was
confined to printing the classics for the enjoyment and education of the elite.
Much like Europe, gunpowder ensured the consolidation of central authority.
Yet, unlike Europe, there were no other powers capable of threatening the
autocratic power of the emperor. There was also a great inhibitor to learning
from outsiders. The cultural superiority of the Ming until around 1750 meant
that they could regard foreigners as ‘barbarians’, and argue that whatever
other societies might try to trade, Chinese goods were far better in quality.
In this way they could maintain traditional methods of production, however
sophisticated and advanced, while remaining blissfully unaware as the Western
world surpassed them.

Of the Islamic empires
none was more powerful than the Ottoman[21]. In
fact, the Ottomans, more than Chinese, was the empire best placed to challenge
the Western world. Its proximity to Europe meant that European technology could
be more readily disseminated. Challenges from the Christian nations on its
borders and at sea encouraged the kind of competition that many scholars have
posed as an answer to rise of the West. It was as much a part of the balance of
power in Europe as any of the Western powers. As a nomadic clan the Ottomans
lacked a long, flourishing cultural history. Unlike the Chinese they were more
open to Western thought, technology, and trade.

The defining moment of
its history came in 1453 when Constantinople fell to Mehmed II’s forces. Swift
victories came soon after in Syria (1516), Egypt and Arabia (1517), Hungary
(1526), and Yemen (1534). At the height of its power Ottoman rule extended from
Iraq to Algeria; from the southern border of Poland to Aden on the Indian Ocean.
These impressive military victories, against foes far more powerful than the
Aztecs and Incas, reveal, firstly, a well organized, efficient, advanced
military structure.

The janissaries were
the most feared warriors on any given battlefield in which they were present.
They were recruited from among the children of the Sultan’s Christian subjects
and probably assured the loyalty of his parents as well. The child converted to
Islam, and his parents prayed for his safety on the battlefield (familial ties
go a long way). The Ottomans also possessed the largest cannons in the
fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and, like most steppe nomads, were
quick to learn the art of siege warfare from those they conquered or could
recruit from outside.

Yet, the Ottoman Empire
also failed to achieve the wealth and power of Europe. Here the culprits seem
to be an environment that inhibited initiative from below and conservatism at
the top. There was institutional change in the Ottoman Empire, but it was
focused on the preservation of central power and did not lead to the kind of
market systems that arose in Europe. The Ottoman Empire was largely a military
state. This should not be taken as a vast plunder machine, or as an unchanging
despotism. The Ottomans were open to change in response to European
encroachment. However, most reforms were at the direction of the central
bureaucracy, and reflected its priorities: the maintenance of central authority
and military primacy[22].

Economic reforms were
meant to raise revenues for state enterprises, above all military reform and
modernization. The number of military defeats after the failed siege of Vienna
in 1683 convinced the Ottoman state that it had lost its military edge to more
modern, industrial armies. During the Ottoman industrial revolution factories
were built to supply the military with European-style outfits. For example, in
1804, a woolen factory was set up near the Bosphorus that made woolen uniforms
for the army[23].
The trouble is that this industrialization never captured, nor was meant to
capture a wide consumer market. Industrialization took place because the sultan
and his advisers knew the army had to modernize.

There was some private
consumption of goods, and the wages in the empire increased steadily.
Unfortunately, there was no serious competition with European products.
Throughout the attempts at modernization, European manufactured goods had
steadily increased sales throughout the Ottoman Empire. The empire relied too
heavily on foreign specialists which required higher pay to encourage
migration. Meanwhile its own citizens lacked the technical skills that the
Europeans employed to encourage innovation from within.

The Ottomans also
failed to establish themselves on the Atlantic. Attempts to conquer all of
North Africa failed when they encountered heavy Spanish resistance near
Gibraltar. The Ottoman Navy lacked the tougher, oceangoing vessels employed by
the Spanish and Portuguese. The refusal of Morocco to accept Ottoman trade and
access to the Atlantic sealed the fate of Ottoman ambitions to reach the
Atlantic. Had they achieved this, the next step could have been an Ottoman navy
on the Atlantic to rival the Spanish and Portuguese, and an Ottoman colony in
the New World.

There is a group of
scholars who contend that Europe’s divergence was both late and devoid of any
long-run dynamics[24].
In the view of these revisionists, all Eurasian societies were proceeding along
similar developmental paths until, due to some chance circumstance, Europe
suddenly pulled ahead, and ended up stifling the other advanced regions’
economic growth and development. There is a grain of truth to this. As we have
seen the other advanced societies were dynamic and powerful, and it was not
immediately apparent in these societies that Western European culture and
methods were superior.

Unfortunately for the
revisionists, their case has been ground down by a number of scholars. Angus
Maddison at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development shatters any claims that the West and the Rest
were all at equal levels in terms of per capita income[25]. Thus
the West was already wealthier than its counterparts in the East. Joseph Bryant
at the University of Toronto offered a blistering critique of the revisionist
case in an article, ‘The West and the Rest Revisited’. Taking each major
revisionist work and breaking down the arguments made, Bryant shows that a
revision to the established wisdom suffers major empirical flaws and
incoherence[26].
Perhaps Bryant’s most powerful statement against the revisionists relies on the
patterns of history itself. Things do not happen by accident; they are a
buildup of deeper trends. Thus the conquest of the New World, the Glorious
Revolution in England, and the Industrial Revolution (to name just a few of the
turning points of history) are not accidents.

To open the revisionist
case up to further skepticism, consider the rise of China over the last three
decades. Is its newfound strength and energy the result of some accident of
history? No revisionist would see it as such, and neither do I. Thus the
revisionists are only interested in overturning what they see as Eurocentric
history. China is modernizing in its own way, according to its own culture,
just as Europeans modernized in their own way beginning in the High Middle
Ages. A better spend of time is to alter our conceptions of other societies by
stressing the value of their cultures rather than portraying them in such a way
that the typical “resterner” would not have recognized himself in order to
delegitimize the rise of the West. The tides of history turn as the result of
dynamics. The question remains, what was the dynamic, present in Western Europe
that led to its rise?

Anthropologist Jared
Diamond attempted an answer to how all societies throughout history have
developed differently in his book Guns,
Germs, and Steel[27].
But not until his article ‘How to Get Rich-A Talk’ did he attempt to
explain how Western Europe forged ahead[28].
The answer: geographic environments favored a plurality of competitive power
centers and an inability for one state to remain isolated. Thus innovation
occurred because falling behind meant that a rival could overpower the more
backward opponent. It also meant that no idiot ruler could force all Europeans
to abandon overseas trade and exploration.

The geographic answer
has been promoted by other scholars in addition to Diamond, and each of them
advances a similar line of reasoning[29].
Large mountain ranges and rivers which flowed in different directions prevented
both the centralizing tendency common in Middle Eastern and East Asian
societies, and protected against rampaging hordes of nomadic warriors. Those
nomads that did come were soon pacified and became part of the fabric of
Europe’s political environment. Dense forests added to this protection and
ensured that farming output was lower in Europe than China. This meant that
there were no masses of peasants that could be easily overrun. All of these
political divisions also benefited rulers in that they could rely on relatively
more loyal subjects than the Eastern empires. In the more populous, yet
sprawled out, empires of China, India, and Islam, the loyalty of the peasant masses
were harder to ensure.

A temperate climate
eliminated the parasites that ravaged the populations of China, India, and
Africa. While Europe was by no means free of disease, the freedom from tropical
diseases and parasites meant that Europeans spent less time recovering and more
time being productive. Stocks of capital were able to accumulate, and damages
from disasters, when it did occur, were repaired relatively quickly. Europeans
had developed an early form of disaster relief to get life back to normal as
quickly as possible[30].

The immense diversity
of resources of Europe, and the simple fact that no state could monopolize such
diversity meant that trade in bulk and strategic products flourished. Timber,
grain, wine, wool, herring, copper, iron, and later products from the New World
were shipped up rivers and across seas and oceans.

The geographic case
suffers some severe flaws that make it untenable as an explanation for why
Western Europe achieved modernity and others did not. First, the only East Asian
power that remained totally isolated was Japan. All of the others were aware of
the developments taking place in the West. In fact, they felt them brought to
bear against them. As we have seen the Ottomans were an integral part of
Western European power politics. In this capacity they were quick to feel the
strain that modern warfare placed on the administration and resources of the
empire. Yet, this doesn’t seem to have brought with it a concomitant upward
spiral in innovation and scientific inquiry. China scoffed at European
achievements, and India was just as politically fragmented as Europe.

Second, the plurality
of power centers was always in jeopardy. One power could harness its resources
and military might against the lesser powers and dominate them. This is nearly
what the Hapsburgs achieved in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
They had all the resources of the New World at their disposal. In Europe, they
had the largest population and some of the best military units in the field. Their
failure to consolidate all of Europe under their banner had more to do with the
institutional shortcomings of the empire than the rival powers ganging up on
them.

Third, sharp
divergences took place in areas that were very similar in terrain and resource
endowments. One quick example is that of Poland and Prussia. The former
gradually drifted into a minor European state, and eventual absorption into
Prussia, Russia, and Austria. This is despite the fact that Poland had once
been powerful. In 1415 a Polish army smashed the Teutonic Knights and
essentially forced them into a puppet state of Poland. It was a Polish army
that forced the Ottomans to raise the Second Siege of Vienna in 1683. However,
it was Prussia who became an advanced military and industrial superpower that
united all the lesser German states into one Germany. This unified Germany
challenged British industrial supremacy despite having little in the way of
strategic resources or even overseas territories.

Fourth, the geographic
answer ignores the true human achievement of all societies. Even Diamond
admitted that progress was a choice.

Could it then really be
the case that Europeans were more innovative than the Rest in nearly every
single aspect simply because they were constantly shooting each other? The
geographic case remains popular in part because it appears to avoid the problem
of Eurocentrism. Europeans did not make the terrain suitable to economic
growth, industrial output, military rivalry, and democracy. However, this could
be taken to mean that nature or God favored Europe above everyone else. This is
patently untrue; God does not take sides (witness the Angel of the Lord who
appeared to Joshua). Geography may have favored Europe in some instances such
as resource endowments, but it did not favor each Western country equally, nor
did it necessarily mean that the most well endowed nations were destined to
become the most powerful. Avoiding Eurocentrism should not lead us to accept
answers that conflict with historical trends. Geography will be featured
throughout this book, but it plays a minor role in the development of the West.

Another
attempted answer is imperialism[31].
It would certainly be wrong to claim that groups of Europeans did not gain from
overseas territories. The sugar, spices, cash crops, gold, silver, and other
products from the New World not only increased the size of Europe’s pocketbook
but its standard of living as well. Corn and sugar became staples of the
European diet, and it is hard to imagine Irish history without the potato once
that crop became widespread.

There
have been empires before those of the West, and none of them produced
modernity. Even within the West the balance sheet of empire remains mixed.
Consider the very different outcomes of the Spanish and English[32].
The Spanish conquered huge tracts of Central and South America which had large
gold and silver mines, abundant resources, and the stored up wealth of the
Aztecs and Incas. Yet, Spain fell behind, and it was not in Spain that the
Industrial Revolution occurred. It has become clear that the easy money of the
New World inhibited industry in Spain and its colonies. Modern economic theory
holds that an increase in the money supply without an equal increase in
productivity leads to inflation, and in Spain it ran rampant, and still the
Crown was unable to cover the debts that European warfare incurred. The Spanish
were an extractive regime which meant the eventual collapse of Spanish power,
and a long road towards recovery for its colonies; a road still traveled by
many Latin American nations today who lag behind their British counterparts in
development.

The
English case stands out in direct contrast with that of the Spanish. English
colonies were intended for settlement not extraction. The English came as
commoners not conquerors and learned to live with the natives rather than as
their slavers and masters. Once it became clear that there was no gold in
Virginia, the English resorted to cash crops such as tobacco. People came for
the opportunity to own their own land and be their own boss.

Now
consider those nations who never had any overseas possessions or were late to
the game. The Austrians, one of the more backward and sluggish European states,
continued to diverge further and further from the Rest in all major development
indicators. Prussia, too, was a relatively backward state until Frederick the
Great. Once it unified Germany and acquired overseas colonies in Africa, there
was neither economic, nor scientific, benefit to Germany. Clearly imperialism
has a mixed record on the development of the mother country. It can retard
development as easily as not being an imperial power can lead to development. It
seems apparent that it matters not the size or initial wealth of an empire, but
the institutions and cultural values which founded that empire in the first
place.

Some
scholars advance the argument that Europeans excelled at savagery; they were
born and raised in a society that celebrated slaughter and violence[33].
It is possible that Europeans were more inclined towards violence than those of
certain hunter-gatherer tribes or small farming communities. Yet, they were not
exceptionally violent in general. The Chinese, Japanese, and Indians committed
frequent infanticide and abortion in order to keep their populations in check.
China experienced frequent peasant revolts and border warfare. The Ottoman
Empire was engaged in war as often as any European state. The Indians engaged
in a number of horrifying acts. A couple of examples should be sufficient here.
The first is the practice of a widow throwing herself onto her dead husband’s
funeral pyre. Another involved ambushing a traveler on the road, strangling
him, cutting out his heart, and eating it in order to absorb his strength. Both
of these practices and several more were ended during the British Raj[34].

I
do not mean to imply that Europeans were not violent. Witch hunts went on well
into the seventeenth century. Religious wars devastated some regions of Europe.
The Thirty Years War made ghost towns of some German state cities. The
expulsion of Jews in Spain and Huguenots in France depopulated some regions and
turned them into backwaters where they once throve. The list of violence and
injustice could continue, but the point here is that, if violence is the only
thing necessary for empire building then it could have been any of the major
Eurasian civilizations to achieve world domination.

David Landes took a more positive view of
European culture. He suggests that Europeans were more inclined than other
societies to tinker, innovate, create, explore, work hard, and disobey the
rules if necessary[35]. Because
of their desire to get rich, merchants were always looking for the best places
to do businesses. They could be picky because of the number of states available
to choose from. Rulers, for their part, desired to increase state revenues and
found that increasing taxable commerce was the best way to achieve this result.
The ruler, therefore, attempted to attract merchants to his kingdom. Thus
cultural norms impacted institutional change. It is a compelling answer, which
I will return to momentarily.

Deidre McCloskey also
saw a cultural dynamic at work. In her book Bourgeois
Dignity she posited that European attitudes towards the bourgeoisie
changed, becoming more favorable towards those who accumulated wealth and came
up with new ideas and methods[36].
However, she believed that this took place just before the Industrial
Revolution. It seems clear that any sufficient explanation is going to require
a long term presence in Western Europe.

Douglass North and
Robert Thomas argue that the dynamic was present as early as 1000 A.D. In their
book, The Rise of the Western World,
they stress the development of well defined property rights necessary for
mercantile activity, technical innovation, and the proliferation of credit
institutions[37].
Perhaps this helps explain the rise of finance and mercantile activity, but
what about science? Galileo knew that his new scientific theories were
unpopular in his time, and that the Church persecuted those who held
potentially heretic beliefs. The same was true of the Protestant reformers,
Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli. These men were, in many ways, ahead of their time.
They pushed their causes because they believed in them, not because there were
assured of intellectual and physical protection. Intellectual property rights
go a long way towards guaranteeing consistent technological and scientific
progress, but to explain the rise of the West a broader explanation is needed.

That broader
institutional case was made most recently by Niall Ferguson. To him there were
six ‘killer apps’ that the West patented which account for the great
divergence: competition, science, property rights, medicine, the consumer
society, and the work ethic[38].
Institutions were developed which facilitated the rise of each of these six
applications. Yet, such institutions were not even fully developed in some
Western nations. Russia, Austria, Spain, and even France did not develop
favorable property rights until relatively late (serfdom was still in place in
Russia after Napoleon). Ferguson favors the English and their offshoots too
heavily in his book without accounting for how the apps developed in many of
the other major Western nations. He counts Russia among the major Western
powers, but little mention of its achievements is given except during the time
of communist rule.

It would not matter
anyway. Institutions cannot be the primary reason the West challenged and the
dominated the Rest. A favorable institutional environment is necessary to
maintain growth, but such institutions were created through cultural means.
Ferguson admits that institutions are products of a culture. Therefore, where
the cultural climate does not exist for institutions which spur economic
growth, scientific inquiry, and technological innovation and invention they are
unable to succeed. Institutions are necessary to define practices and maintain
modernity, but they are not the ultimate cause of modernity.

It is clear what
happens when different institutions, one that favors growth, and one which
inhibits growth are imposed on a people with the same culture. Here a good
example is Germany. In the west, capitalism and liberal democracy were put in
place and the West German economy moved along almost as if the Second World War
never happened. In the east, communist institutions were set up, and the
economy stagnated, innovation floundered for four decades, and there was next
to nothing in the way of scientific achievement. Yet, communism could not be
maintained in East Germany. People longed for the freedom which existed on the
other side of the Iron Curtain; a freedom they knew from before Nazism. Even in
the rest of Eastern Europe communism crumbled away. It was not because of
outside pressures which broke the back of communist institutions. Instead,
communism was imposed on peoples of an unfavorable cultural environment. They
fought against the system, and prevailed.

What is needed is a
broader, more comparative approach that accounts for the major revolutions that
took place in Western civilization: military, scientific, financial,
democratic, and industrial. Throughout the literature on Western ascendancy
some of these pioneering revolutions are accounted for. Often the economic and
political developments are covered excellently while the scientific and
military sides are neglected. No single work covers each of these in equal
portions, nor traces their development throughout the member states of Western
civilization.

Each of these revolutions has a common thread
found in the individual initiative found in the West. Change happened from
below, not from institutional structures. William McNeill mourned the lack of
literature focusing on individual effort in creating the modern world; this is
an attempt to satisfy him. What was realized in Western Europe was the human
potential. The West patented a certain kind of environment which allowed
individuals to explore their talents and test what they were capable of.
Institutions favorable to innovation, development, and military power do not
come about because of the orders of some central authority (that is a
tautology); they are constantly adapted to the cultural climate in which they
exist. Indeed, the Ottoman Empire provides a good example of what happens when
change is attempted from the top.

Eventually prescient
individuals started to figure out what was required in order to spur
technological innovation, economic growth, military power, and scientific
achievement. Only in Europe was a partnership forged between institutions and
society, but only after certain developments took place. In Europe, old
institutions that hampered growth were torn down. Feudalism, as a mode of
economic organization, was eventually done away with.

And there doesn’t appear
to be a sudden cultural revolution that turned people towards innovation. As we
have noted before, the West was wealthier than the Rest by 1500. Innovation
(though not much invention) had been going on in Western Europe for centuries
before the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century, or even the
Scientific Revolution in the seventeenth.

A few clarifications
are in order. We are all made in God’s image, thus we all possess the same
ability to rationalize, create, innovate, and order-essentially, the same
potential. Western individuals were not inherently better than the individuals
in other societies in these regards. Rather it was because of their cultural
environment that the behavioral differences were created. Witness China, whose people
made remarkable advances in military weaponry, engineering, agriculture, and
navigation despite an institutional and cultural environment which was often
hostile to such endeavors. Look also at the Jews who lived in the West. All too
often a society hostile to Jews suffered a drop in human capital because of
pogroms against them. Jews worked hard and were just as capable of success as
their European neighbors. These are only a couple of examples of human
capabilities.

By adopting a cultural
answer to the modern world I am not suggesting that Western European culture is
superior in some way. There are many cultures outside of the West who are
finding that the ingredients necessary to create a modern society are within
them. Societies as diverse as Brazil, China, India, Turkey, Indonesia,
Malaysia, and many more are growing up. Besides, cultural superiority is a
relative thing; who are Westerners to suggest that their culture is the best
because it meets a certain Western definition of superiority. Other cultures
possess value in meeting the (spiritual, physical, mental) needs of its people.
The Western world is unique, but neither superior nor universal (though it
certainly came close to universality).

Figure
1.1

Individualism
makes sense as an explanation for Western power and wealth. The West values
individualism above all else-yes, even its liberal democracy and capitalism
because it sees these things as the best ways to protect individual liberty and
rights. It was only in the West that individuals could have the impact upon
history that they did. They built empires; rationalized science and discovery;
pushed the limits of what was known; explored; and traded. No one nation could
monopolize individual talent because all nations attempted to enhance it to
varying degrees and using similar methods. Once one nation adopted policies
favorable to individual achievement, other nations could copy these policies.
Western civilization was bonded by a common culture which meant a constant
increase in the power of individuals. Today, new interpretations of Western
history threaten this cultural unity. The West is going through an identity
crisis; the largest it has ever suffered.

The
Fading of Western Unity

“He who fears what is to come usually also
fears facing what has already been…But lying
can never save us from the lie. Falsifiers of history do not safeguard freedom
but imperil it. The assumption that one can, with impunity navigate through
history and rewrite one's own biography belongs to the traditional Central
European delusions”[39] Vaclav Havel delivered
these words directed at Central Europeans not to forget or corrupt their past
yet they have powerful meaning for all the Western world, and indeed any
society.

In the West, the misdeeds of
imperialism became a beacon around which the victims gathered to tell a less
glorious account of Western history. Like the revisionists I mentioned above,
those who are one or two generations removed from someone living under Western
dominance object to any account of history which suggests that Western Europe,
and then Western civilization more broadly possessed any unique
characteristics. Instead, Europeans were savages until they came into contact
with African civilizations. Moral indignation does not get us very far,
unfortunately.

This is why history is so important.
Any society which does not know its past forgets itself. I have become
frustrated at the number of college students who do not know basic facts about
American history. Studies of American adults evince a dismal knowledge of basic
American history: more than one-third of respondents thought the American
Revolution happened after the Civil War; many did not know that the Bill of
Rights was part of the Constitution. A study done by the National Assessment of
Educational Progress found that only one quarter of American schoolchildren
from elementary to high school are deemed “proficient” in history[40].

It
seems almost counter-intuitive to say that as we forget our past it can be
painted to suit other agendas (how does one change what has already happened).
Yet, our perceptions of the past are highly fluid; we can forget who we are and
how we got here when our past is hidden from us. Milan Kundera’s book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting has
one historian say, “The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its
memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have someone
manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will
begin to forget what it is and what it was”. America is a melting pot society,
forging all groups, nationalities, races, and religions into a single American
culture. Sure, American culture has changed over the course of its history, but
there can be no doubt that its institutions and values are distinctly Western.
Thus this book is as much about answering who and what the West is, as offering
a unique answer for its power and wealth.

There are groups who challenge this
identity. In the last century one minority group after another has decried the
focus of history text books on white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestants and their role
in making America. Basing their arguments on the damaging effect this has on
minorities, groups such as the Task Force on Minorities, attempt to change the
American focus of history to minority groups. A report published by the Task
Force sees racism and hatred at work in the curriculums of schools and
universities. It also suggests that the reason minorities do so poorly in
American schools is because they lack role models who are like them, as if to
say that a minority could not become a Beethoven, Shakespeare, Galileo, or
Michelangelo if he or she wanted to be. This is not to say that the West is the
only culture with great men and women, and for far too long the heroes of other
cultures have gone unnoticed in Western textbooks.

This is not a solution to the
problem. In fact, it exacerbates it by dividing us still further. Rather than
suggesting that George Washington or Christopher Columbus are only minor
players in American history, perhaps a better remedy is teaching minority
children that these individuals are as much a part of their past as a white
child. I echo again Genesis 1: 26-27 in saying that we are all human beings and
the achievements of individuals and societies should be appreciated not because
a white man or a black man accomplished them, but because they represent what
humanity is capable of. Teach all American students to be inspired by the
accomplishments of their fellow Americans.

It
is hardly the case that minorities do poorly in US schools because they are
taught a history which emphasizes America’s ties to the West, and, more
specifically, to British values and institutions. Instead, they underperform
whites in schools because they face tough institutional resistance to their
success. Interestingly, Asians do better in school than whites despite being
portrayed as mistrusted and expendable railroad workers in the late nineteenth
century and the very blunt mistreatment they faced at the hands of the American
government, particularly, but not limited to, bans on Asian immigration.

I
cannot say exactly when I noticed it. Perhaps it was at my home church in Grand
Rapids, Michigan at the time of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. The
championship match saw the Dutch pitted against the Spanish. I made it clear
that I was supporting Spain because I claimed (erroneously) that Spain was more
European; more imperial, greater contributions to Western civilization. My friends,
many of whom had never even visited the Netherlands retorted with, “If ya ain’t
Dutch, ya ain’t much”! Or, perhaps it was at Barnes and Noble before the
tournament had started I overheard a Latino family discussing the teams they
wanted to see win: Brazil, Mexico, Uruguay, Paraguay, etc. Italy was the first
Western team whose name I heard, and the US wasn’t even mentioned. Whenever it
was, I came to the realization that Americans no longer seemed united behind an
American identity. The World Cup brought out feelings of pride, not in the
country people lived in, but where their ancestors came from.

Arthur
M. Schlesinger, Jr. adroitly characterized this shifting attitude: “Instead of
a transformative nation with an identity all its own, America increasingly sees
itself as preservative of old identities…as composed of groups more or less
indelible in their own ethnic character”[41]. There are, of course,
two sides to this shift. The more positive path is simply taking pride in a
particular heritage. What is far more dangerous is when people of different
groups within countries choose to define themselves negatively against one
another. When a common American identity is not realized then the potential for
conflict is multiplied. Steven Pinker argued that violent people are often
stateless[42].
Instead of feeling a sense of allegiance to American values, norms, and law,
they owe allegiance to nothing except those who are like them. America has
always a nation built by immigrants from around the world. Once, Americans took pride in their melting
pot society-the metaphor that all races, religions, and groups were forged into
a common community unified by key Western political ideals. Today, the salad
bowl metaphor is preferred; all kinds of variety with no one singular flavor.

As
with America, so with Europe and the entire West. Australia faces the backlash
of two centuries of dominating primitive aborigines. Canada, divided between
French and English-speaking regions, nearly separated into two nations in 1991.
Europeans, like the United States, are facing new immigration challenges.
Muslims pour into Germany and France seeking asylum or economic opportunity
(mostly the former as these two are losing their competitive edge). Unless they
can be properly assimilated into Western societies, immigrants will never feel
quite at home in the West. In many cases this leads to tension and conflict
between groups. France, Germany, and many other Western European countries are
trying to figure how to define themselves in the wake of these fresh
immigrants. Europeans seem reluctant to pay taxes into a welfare state when
people who are seen as different, perhaps even threatening, are benefitting.
The question is, will the differences unite the West, or get in the way of
unity?

The British seem to be losing faith
in the EU at a time when it is imperative that the West stick together. A
referendum is set to take place in 2017, and will decide whether or not the
U.K. will remain an EU member state. Granted, Britain may be able to exit the
Union with little disruption since it is part of the Euro-zone, but such a
phenomenon represents the deeper attitudes of the British people. Should
Britain vote to exit the EU, or even remain a member with a large minority
voting for exit, it will impress upon the world that Britain does not identify
itself with its continental friends. It will also be a blow to confidence in
the EU to act as a strong unifying institution capable of strengthening its
member states and setting broad coordination between them.

At the same time as the EU seems on
the verge of break-up, America and Europe don’t have the unity they once had.
The War on Terror shoved a wedge between the two greatest Western components.
Thomas Friedman, New York Times foreign correspondent, traveled to Europe to
find out whether or not Europeans actually hated America. In interviews with
French and German citizens the impression was clear: by acting unilaterally,
and against the wishes of many European nations, American foreign policy became
seen as arrogant and belligerent. A Foreign Affairs article spoke of a lack of
understanding between the two cultures. Past Secretaries of State such as Dean
Acheson and John Foster Dulles possessed a “deep personal knowledge of Europe
and its heritage”[43]. Today’s American policy
makers can speak arrogantly about an “Old Europe”-which is to say, one that
will not back American saber rattling in the Middle East.

With
the challenges facing the West in the twenty-first century perhaps its efforts
are better spent responding to them with closer coordination and respect. As
Samuel Huntington said in his influential book Clash of Civilizations “America and Europe will hang together or
hang separately”[44].
The West is far stronger united than it is divided. America must accept its
role as a Western power-indeed, as its core state. Europe must mold the EU into
a workable union, and coordinate with the United States in order to set foreign
policy goals for both of the major Western components. The time for unilateral action
by this or that Western power has passed. Now the West must meet the challenges
of the twenty-first century as one. This means understanding each others’
position and aims.

There
certainly was hope in Friedman’s documentary: Europeans long for the America
that made them dream big. Once, America instilled a sense of creativity and
excitement in Europe. Add to this the fact that both Europe and America are
bound by more than just historical ties; there are deeper cultural bonds that
run through the West, as in all civilizations. Freedom, equality, justice, a
Christian heritage, and the belief that all persons have certain rights-a human
dignity, along with a sense of progress: these are values that characterize the
West.

The
facts are clear: for the last five hundred years the primary mover of progress
has been Western civilization; at one point or another nearly all cultures were
converted to the Western way of life; for better or worse the world we have
inherited is-in large part-the creation of the West. Moralists will find all of
this disconcerting, unless they happen to be like me in believing that the
world we have inherited is better than the world of the past. My religion and
my view of the past allow me to be an optimist for the future, but will it be a
future in which the West continues to play a leading role? This is a question
we will return to. For now we must look at the individualism that gave the West
the lead in military power, technological improvement, scientific discovery,
and economic wealth.

“And I heard a loud voice from the throne
saying, ‘Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They
will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will
wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mouning or
crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away…I am making
everything new!”

Revelation 21:3-5a

[1]
McNeill, Rise of the West; Roberts, Triumph of the West; Ferguson, Civilization

[2]
McNeill, Rise of the West; Ferguson, Civilization; Darwin, After Tamerlane; Kennedy, Rise and Fall of the Great Powers; Landes,
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations

[20]
For what follows see Hucker, China’s
Imperial Past; McNeill, Rise of the
West; Kennedy, Rise and Fall of the
Great Powers; Elvin, Pattern of the
Chinese Past

[21]
There is an excellent summary of the power and weaknesses of the Ottomans in
Kennedy, Rise and Fall of the Great
Powers. For a larger discussion see Inalcik, The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Period, 1300-1600 ; McNeill, Rise of the West ; Doumanis, Nicholas.
‘The Ottoman Empire: A Resilient Polity’ in Robert Aldrich (ed.) The Age of Empires; Inalcik and Pamuk. An Economic and Social History of the
Ottoman Empire, 1300-1914

[22]
Pamuk, Sevket. ‘Institutional Change and the Longevity of the Ottoman Empire, 1500-1800’

[24]
For an excellent summary of the revisionist case see Goldstone, ‘The Rise of
the West-or Not?: A Revision to Socio-economic History’. However, perhaps the
most famous revisionist case is Pomeranz, The
Great Divergence

[25]
Maddison, World Economy: A Millennial
Perspective. The data for the chart below comes from Appendix B

[26]
Bryant, Joseph M., ‘The West and the Rest Revisited: Debating Capitalist
Origins, European Colonialism, and the Advent
of Modernity’.

[37]
North, Douglass C. and Robert Thomas, The
Rise of the Western World

[38]
Ferguson, Niall. Civilization: the West
and the Rest. This book presents a fantastic range of Western ideas, and is
the inspiration for this book. See also Bernstein, The Birth of Plenty and Acemoglu et al. Why Nations Fail

[39]
Kamm, Henry. “Evolution in Europe; 2 Heads of State Call on Waldheim”, New York Times.